Victorian England's Most Gruesome Murder

Summary

After Dark: Victorian England's Most Gruesome Murder – Detailed Summary

Episode Release Date: June 2, 2025
Hosts: Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling

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Introduction

In this chilling episode of After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal, historians Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling delve into one of Victorian England's most gruesome murders. The story intertwines dark history with modern-day discoveries, unraveling the sinister tale of Kate Webster and the mysterious dismemberment of her mistress, Julia Martha Thomas.

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Discovery in the Garden (00:02:33 - 00:05:04)

The episode opens with an evocative reenactment of a 2010 garden discovery in Richmond, a wealthy London suburb. An elderly homeowner, humorously impersonating Sir David Attenborough, engages workmen excavating his garden. Their efforts unearthed a disturbing find: an empty human eye socket—a skull.

Anthony Delaney (00:05:07):
“At first I thought Maddy was reading the wrong script there. I was like, why are we in a garden? Why is it the 21st century?”

This startling discovery set the stage for uncovering a dark chapter from the Victorian era, bringing historical crime into the present day.

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Historical Context: Victorian England (00:05:17 - 00:14:30)

Maddy provides a comprehensive backdrop of 1879 England, highlighting societal dynamics and technological advancements.

Maddy Pelling (00:07:18):
“Queen Victoria is on the throne, Benjamin Disraeli as the Prime Minister in Great Britain. There is a war going on between the British and the Zulus in Africa.”

She touches upon the British Empire's global influence, the ongoing Anglo-Zulu war, and significant milestones like Newcastle lighting Mosley Street with electricity—a relatively late development for 1879.

Maddy Pelling (00:08:35):
“In Ireland, there is a famine and there's about to be the land war that year.”

This period was marked by social upheaval, economic disparity, and the burgeoning media's fascination with sensational crimes, setting the perfect stage for notorious figures like Jack the Ripper to emerge a decade later.

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Introducing Kate Webster (00:10:56 - 00:15:59)

The focus shifts to Kate Webster, the central figure of the murder case. Maddy introduces Kate as a 30-year-old Irish immigrant from County Wexford, working as a general servant for Julia Martha Thomas in Richmond.

Maddy Pelling (00:13:03):
“She claims that she was married to a sea captain called John Webster and that she had four children. However, she then claimed that the husband and all four children had died.”

Kate's precarious life, marked by multiple arrests for larceny and unstable personal relationships, paints a picture of a woman possibly driven to desperate measures. Her role as a general servant, encompassing a myriad of household duties, strained under the pressures of 19th-century domestic hierarchies.

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The Gruesome Murder (00:17:03 - 00:32:11)

On a fateful day in January 1879, tensions between Kate and her employer escalate. An argument erupts, leading Kate to violently push Julia Martha Thomas down the stairs, resulting in severe injuries.

Anthony Delaney (00:05:19):
“It's not even Alison Hammond, it's David Attenborough. It's the Nationalist of all nationalist treasures.”

In a state of panic and fear of discovery, Kate resorts to dismembering her mistress using a copper pot for boiling—a common laundry appliance of the time—and various kitchen implements. Her gruesome efforts to dispose of the body are chaotic and inefficient, indicating a disturbed mental state.

Maddy Pelling (00:25:07):
“I chopped off the head from the body, assisted with the use of a razor. I also used the meat saw and the carving knife to cut up the body.”

The narrative describes Kate's frenzied attempts to obliterate evidence, resulting in malformed body parts scattered and eventually buried near David Attenborough's garden—tying back to the modern discovery that sparked the investigation.

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Attempted Concealment and Deception (00:32:31 - 00:36:33)

Kate's desperation drives her to impersonate her deceased mistress, adopting Julia Thomas's attire and identity to deflect suspicion. She approaches the Porter family in Hammersmith, posing as Mrs. Thomas to solicit assistance in selling household belongings.

Despite initial hospitality, subtle oddities in her behavior and the mysterious box containing body parts begin to raise eyebrows. Kate's interactions highlight her cunning yet flawed attempt to evade detection, culminating in the inadvertent suspension of the dismembered head in a pub's soil—a detail that would later resurrect the macabre tale.

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Media Portrayal and Lingering Myths (00:37:25 - 00:42:44)

The episode critically examines how Kate Webster's crimes were sensationalized by the Victorian press, perpetuating myths such as her selling human fat as lard to unsuspecting children—a claim not substantiated by primary sources but widely reported in modern media.

Maddy Pelling (00:41:44):
“The Daily Mail headline... reads, 'cut up and boiled to feed street children.'"

This portrayal intertwines with prevalent anti-Irish sentiments of the era, using derogatory terms like "savage" both to discredit Kate and to underscore her brutal actions. The hosts discuss the lasting impact of such narratives on public perception, emphasizing the challenges in distinguishing fact from embellished fiction.

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Social Implications and Gender Dynamics (00:42:47 - 00:45:18)

Anthony and Maddy delve into the societal undercurrents that may have influenced the crime, including the pressures faced by immigrant women, the rigid Victorian gender roles, and the fraught relationships between servants and employers. Kate's actions defy contemporary expectations of femininity, making her case particularly sensational and disturbing to Victorian audiences.

Anthony Delaney (00:44:06):
“...the door is closed, there's two women living together, not particularly unusual, and the tensions between them... the house transforms itself from this workaday, lower middle-class London house into a gruesome murder scene.”

This transformation from mundane domestic life to horror underscores the volatility of personal relationships constrained by societal norms and economic hardships.

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Conclusion: Historical Relevance and Modern Echoes (00:45:18 - 00:47:00)

Wrapping up, the hosts reflect on the profound layers of history uncovered through Kate Webster's case. They emphasize how uncovering such crimes connects us to the hidden, often brutal realities beneath the surface of everyday life, both in the past and present.

Maddy Pelling (00:45:18):
“It's a reminder... how visceral that is beneath our feet and that beneath the ground is evidence of all manner of human life, good and bad, waiting to be discovered.”

Anthony shares his fascination with how private domestic spaces can harbor unimaginable secrets, drawing parallels with other infamous Victorian crimes like those of Rillington Place and Dr. Crippen. The episode concludes by inviting listeners to explore related cases in future episodes, highlighting the enduring allure of Victorian-era mysteries.

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Additional Notes

• Artistic Representation: Maddy mentions a waxwork representation of Kate Webster, noting its unsettling and masculine portrayal, which reflects Victorian stereotypes of Irish immigrants as brutish and uncivilized.

• Media Influence: The discussion underscores the role of media in shaping and perpetuating myths, often blurring the lines between fact and sensationalism, which continues to influence modern perceptions of historical events.

• Gender and Crime: The hosts explore the societal shock and fascination with female perpetrators, contrasting it with the more normalized perception of male violence, and how this dynamic played out in Victorian society.

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This episode of After Dark offers a harrowing glimpse into Victorian England's underbelly, exploring themes of immigration, gender, societal expectations, and the dark allure of sensational crimes. Through meticulous storytelling and critical analysis, Anthony and Maddy illuminate the complexities of a society where personal vendettas and systemic pressures converge in acts of unimaginable violence.

Transcript

[Anthony Delaney]

Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling and if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.

[Maddy Pelling]

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[Anthony Delaney]

Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Anthony Delaney]

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.

[Maddy Pelling]

And I'm Maddie and today we are.

[Anthony Delaney]

Talking about a particularly gruesome case. So if there are little ears around, then maybe this isn't the one for them. Or if you're eating your lunch, this also Might not be the best time to do that because we're talking about murder, we're talking about 19th century servants, we're talking about dismemberment and we're talking about a head that appears in the back garden of a national treasure. This is the history that Maddie's just about to tell us of Kate Webster.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's 2010 and in the autumn sunshine, a mini digger is clawing at the thick London clay in a back garden in Richmond, a wealthy suburb on the bank of the River Thames. Making his way through the lush vegetation of the garden towards the workman. And the yellow digger is the 84 year old homeowner. He opens his mouth and asks in a hushed, husky tone, famous across the world, who'd like a cup of tea? Yes, we are in the garden, as you will be able to tell from my fantastic impression of Sir David Attenborough, friend of gorillas, penguins and legendary presenter of BBC nature documentaries. As Attenborough heads off with the tea order, the digger returns to work, scraping up the thick London sod that holds so many secrets and is about to offer up one more. The digger suddenly pauses. The workmen peer into the hole. There's something strange at the bottom that doesn't look quite right. Something dark, circular. Digging by hand now, they uncover more of it. A cold shiver passes over them. For looking up from the bottom of the hole is the empty eye socket of a human. Sam.

[Anthony Delaney]

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I am Anthony.

[Maddy Pelling]

And I'm Maddy.

[Anthony Delaney]

And at first I thought Maddy was reading the wrong script there. I was like, why are we in a garden? Why is it the 21st century? I don't really understand.

[Maddy Pelling]

And why is David Attenborough?

[Anthony Delaney]

Well, that was where I did get really confused. And then of course there was a skull and I was like, ah, of course it's after dark, we found a skull. It's so bizarre to me that, like, this is such a perfect story in many ways, isn't it? It's like a crime unearthed. It's a national treasure. It's not even Alison Hammond, it' David Attenborough. It's the Nationalist of all nationalist treasures.

[Maddy Pelling]

Were those only the two options?

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, those are your two, Alison or David. And this is not something I was aware of. I didn't even know that the school was found, let alone the actual history behind it. So this is an interesting way of understanding how crime history, the history of immigration, history of 19th century servitude comes into ideas of Britishness now. And, you know, it's essentially A strange excavatory tea party that's happening. How much more British could it be with David Attenborough?

[Maddy Pelling]

I don't think there's much more to say to that. I think that's the end of the episode. That's fantastic.

[Anthony Delaney]

But it's not the end, is it? Cause take me to the time of the crime. I think, first of all, we'll come back to David. But we're talking 19th century here, right?

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. And I'm gonna give you the context in just a second. But first of all, I want to say as well that this is about history that is incredibly tangible. Often we talk about darker aspects of history that have happened so far in the past that they do feel removed from us. And we can still talk about their effects, their victims, in ways that are as critical, as rigorous and as empathetic as possible. But this is us in 2010 being confronted with the evidence of a crime, a vicious, brutal, violent crime. And there's something about that being unearthed in the garden of David Attenborough that just makes it so immediate and so shocking and it sort of catapults it into our national consciousness, I suppose. So. Okay, let me give you some context. We are in. We're traveling all the way back to 1879. Obviously, Queen Victoria is on the throne in Britain. Never heard of her. Never heard of her. We have multiple episodes on Queen Victoria. So, Anthony, go back and listen to those.

[Anthony Delaney]

You are so good at telling people to go back and listen to old episodes. I always forget to do that.

[Maddy Pelling]

You literally every episode now we say Anthony can't remember the episodes, but he truly can't. Like, he really never.

[Anthony Delaney]

No, I never have a clue what's going on. I don't even know what's going on right now, apart from the fact that it says in my notes that there's an Anglo Zulu war going on. So going to have to tell me about that.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah, there is. So there's Victoria on the throne, Benjamin Disraeli as the Prime Minister in Great Britain. There is a war going on between the British and the Zulus in Africa. And this is within the context of a wider British Empire. And the British soldiers there are armed predominantly with very modern weapons. And the Zulus mainly are using spears against them. So there's a sort of inequality and imbalance and violence going on across the world. Under the British Empire, there are other innovations happening. On the 3rd of February of that year, 1879, Mosley street in Newcastle becomes the first street in the world to be lit by electricity, which surprises me. That's quite late the 1879.

[Anthony Delaney]

Why do you hate Newcastle? Wow.

[Maddy Pelling]

Cancel.

[Anthony Delaney]

She said that.

[Maddy Pelling]

I love Newcastle, actually.

[Anthony Delaney]

No, I actually really love it.

[Maddy Pelling]

Some great 18th century buildings.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, it's quite Vibey, too.

[Maddy Pelling]

Shout out to Newcastle and the northeast of the. You've redeemed yourself a half of you. Okay. Moving swiftly on. Less happy news. In Ireland, there is a famine and there's about to be the land war that year.

[Anthony Delaney]

So good transition there. Less happy news, the famine in Ireland. I can laugh at it. I'm Ireland. You're safe with me, Maddy.

[Maddy Pelling]

Wow. The other thing, and I think this is really relevant to the story that we're about to tell, is that people are becoming increasingly obsessed with murder. Remember, we are only a decade away here from Jack the Ripper, and in this time, the press have really caught on to this public interest and a good murder case. Something really shocking that has different implications, that unearths and exposes tensions of class or gender, as so often these violent crimes do. A good story can sell up to a million pamphlets. So this is big business. And of course, the decade later, Jack the Ripper is gonna explode. Explode that completely. Yeah.

[Anthony Delaney]

So we have David Attenborough.

[Maddy Pelling]

We do.

[Anthony Delaney]

We have a skull in the back garden. We now have the context of that kind of Victorian crime era. We know where we are situated in terms of being 1879. We've also heard the name Kate Webster, so I'm not forgetting that. We'll come back to that. But what I guess I want to know next is who owns that skull? Sounds like a terrible game show. Whose skull is this?

[Maddy Pelling]

Time to play.

[Anthony Delaney]

Probably shouldn't be joking about that, but go on. Who is it?

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay, so, well, we do know. We do know. And before I tell you, we need to establish some geography, I think, here of the site where this skull is found. So we've got the house that now belongs to David Attenborough. He then bought an old Victorian pub that was adjoining his property. It's called the Hole in the Wall. And he buys this pub. On the other side of the Attenborough property dynasty that's being expanded in Richmond is the house of a woman in the Victorian era called Julia Martha Thomas. Now, we think that the skull is hers. She was murdered in the year 1879, and her head was never found. The rest of her was found. And we're gonna get into the details of what happened to that because spoiler alert. And put your sandwich down. It's not great, but, yeah, we think that the skull was hers. She was a widow. She was in her 50s. She was possibly a little bit eccentric. There's some interesting sort of peculiarities about her life. She lived alone except for a servant, Kate Webster.

[Anthony Delaney]

The links all link.

[Maddy Pelling]

The links are linking.

[Anthony Delaney]

So Kate, then is. Know nothing of her apart from the fact that she's Irish. We're just handed a card with all the names of Irish people who've done terrible things.

[Maddy Pelling]

Before you're allowed to leave the country, you have to memorize all.

[Anthony Delaney]

Here you go. These are the ones to avoid. Don't claim them.

[Maddy Pelling]

Don't behave like these people. Yeah, if you're going abroad, they've embarrassed us.

[Anthony Delaney]

So Kate's gone to London, and she's working in London in the 1870s. But who is she? What's the background apart from Ireland? Give us a bit more.

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay, so she's from County Wexford. What part of Ireland is that?

[Anthony Delaney]

Southeast.

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay, southeast.

[Anthony Delaney]

I'm from Southeast, too, but not Wexford.

[Maddy Pelling]

I don't think you want to claim anything in common with this woman. You're about to find out. Like, let's maybe park that. She's from a place called. Is it Culzean? Killen?

[Anthony Delaney]

Culzean, yeah. I've never heard of it.

[Maddy Pelling]

Well, I'm gonna pronounce it like that.

[Anthony Delaney]

I'd say it's Culain.

[Maddy Pelling]

She's Catholic. She's born in 1849. Now, she is a really fascinating person because her backstory is kind of a web of truth and lies, and it's really murky. Nobody really knows what the answers are. So she claimed that she was married to a sea captain called John Webster and that she had four children. However, she then claimed that the husband and all four children had died, which, of course, you know, 19th century. It's not necessarily unlikely, but seems like a nice clean break. She comes to England in her teens, so she's been in England for a significant amount of time. And she works on and off as a servant in and around London, as many women of her social class would have done. That was a sort of generally accessible career path to many people. She then has a child by a man known only as Strong. And this is in 1874, so quite soon before the murder is gonna take place.

[Anthony Delaney]

Five. Arduino's right.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yes. Good maths. They have a child together and he abandons her. And all we know about him is that he's called Strong, which, in my head, I'm picturing like a Victorian strong man.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, I don't know. I'm Picturing Mark Strong, you know, that actor?

[Maddy Pelling]

Oh, yeah. He looks exactly like my dad. Like, exactly like my dad.

[Anthony Delaney]

I've met your dad, so I don't know.

[Maddy Pelling]

No, he really does. It's weird, it's freaky. It was the talk of my wedding, not me getting married, but how much my dad looked.

[Anthony Delaney]

That is such a niche thing to be able to talk about.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. Well done. Moving on. She has this child. He abandons them. She then gets a job working for this Julia, Martha Thomas, next door neighbour to David Ashford. He's not that old. And this is in January 1879. She's working as a general servant. We will get into that later. But this is, as you would imagine, someone who does all the jobs of the house, bit of everything. And it's, you know, real dog's body work. It's tiring, it's nonstop. It's the most menial and the most complex tasks of the house. It's a lot of work. At this point, she is around 30 years old, approximately. Again, the backstory is not necessarily backstorying.

[Anthony Delaney]

So not young, but not old. Certainly, you know, would be expected to have some life experience behind her by the time she was 30. In this.

[Maddy Pelling]

I mean, as someone in the very early 30s, I would like to be considered younger in terms of Victorian, of.

[Anthony Delaney]

Course, not old, but in terms of the Victorian era. She has established herself in womanhood by this point, put it that way.

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay.

[Anthony Delaney]

Why have you not. I know I have.

[Maddy Pelling]

I have years ahead of me to do this. The other thing about her, which is really, really important is that she has been arrested multiple times for larceny. So theft of private property, which just.

[Anthony Delaney]

To point out at this point. Right. Big jump between larceny and pretty brutal murder, which is where we're heading.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, she's from an immigrant class, a working class, where opportunities are not open to her. Obviously, if we are to take her backstory at face value. She has had multiple sexual and romantic relationships. She's had multiple children, presumably all of whom have died, if she had any in the first place. Again, we're not sure. But it's a very unstable life. And it's a life that, like so many in this era and in the centuries before that, is really fluid and moves in and out of different households, different family structures, different work situations. And so you can see how crime and theft as a means to survive might creep in. I've told you a little bit about her, but I now want you to meet her and I want you to look at this image of her, which we'll put on our socials for anyone not watching on YouTube. This is a waxwork done of Kate.

[Anthony Delaney]

Oh, so this isn't an image of her per se, it's an image of her waxwork.

[Maddy Pelling]

This is a photograph of her waxwork that was created from the life though, from her. And she was alive during this time when the waxwork was put on display. So, I mean, we'll never know how close it is to how she looked, but I think the way that she's presented here is absolutely fascinating.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah. Do you want me to describe it in age old fashioned production, seeing as.

[Maddy Pelling]

Though this is primarily an audio production, it might be helpful.

[Anthony Delaney]

Okay, so we have somebody who is. Well, it's a black and white photograph. This woman Kate, or a representation of Kate is slap bang in the center. Her waxwork is facing us straight on. It's a very masculine face. It's a very hardened face. And then she's dressed in the trappings of very Victorian womanhood and quite fine clothes. Yeah, I was gonna say she wouldn't necessarily have had these clothes unless she has robbed them. And larceny is part of her thing.

[Maddy Pelling]

We're gonna find out.

[Anthony Delaney]

Oh, okay.

[Maddy Pelling]

So put a pin in that thought because we are gonna come back to that.

[Anthony Delaney]

Right, so she's very, very finely dressed. Very unsettling. That's a very determined stare. I get that it's waxwork. It's not necessarily her stare, but they have presented her in this way. It's very, very. The hands, Maddie. I don't know, there's something about the hands that just seem very, very lifelike.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. And I suppose we have to remember as well this is a waxwork created after people knew about her crimes. So there's a heavy dose of sort of sensationalism and making her into a monster. And we're gonna talk about some of the language that's used to describe her in the press as monstrous. There's something very unsettling about the way she's slightly leaning towards us, ever so slightly. And yeah, that very direct gaze. If you met her in the street, you would be genuinely unsettled. What do you make of how masculine she is presented as? Cause I think it's very telling of these ideas of Victorian womanhood and violence and them not going hand in hand necessarily. And I think what you're saying about her hands in this image, actually they're very masculine. They're very lifelike, but they're. They're sort of big and strong looking and capable of terrible things, as we're.

[Anthony Delaney]

Gonna find out with depictions of Irish people in the 19th century. You often get this thing where it's a very heavy browed, very heavy face, almost ape like. And that was very purposeful. That was designed to be the case that we were uncivilized or we were uncontrollable or we were animalistic. And there are elements of that. It's softer because maybe that's that femininity coming through. But there's certainly a heavy brow there. It's worn. It's a worn face. This is apparently the person, this is apparently the case who is in this lady's house and is being her general servant.

[Maddy Pelling]

I have to say I don't think looking at her waxwait that I would hire her as a servant. Yeah. So she is living in the house of Julia Martha Thomas or Mrs. Thomas, and they live together alone. Obviously we know Mrs. Thomas was a widow and from the off, Kate really doesn't enjoy her work. She complains about it a lot. And we mentioned that she's a general servant. There is an account that I have here of the kinds of. It's a description of not Kate's duties necessarily, but the duties of a general servant. And this is taken from around the same time. It says she is to cook, slush and butler. She has to be up for the milk in the morning, clean the brasses, wash the steps, light the fires, clean the hall and dining room, lay the table, get breakfast, have the kitchen clean, answer all the knocks in the meantime and have herself tidied to serve the breakfast and have all the boots polished by that time. So this is a lot for one person. In a bigger, wealthier household, there would be multiple people assigned to each of these roles.

[Anthony Delaney]

So she's in a middle class house, basically. This is not an elite home.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's not an elite home and it's, I would say, lower middle class. It's not one servant. Yeah, it's not a sort of socially ambitious household, but, you know, it's wealthy enough to have one servant. They do not get on. Kate is constantly complaining about the work she's got to do. Mrs. Thomas, fair enough, she's paying her for the work, finds that quite annoying. On Sunday 2nd March in this year, this fateful year, it's a half day holiday and Kate takes herself off to the Hole in the wall, which is David Andrew's pub. Yeah, exactly. Now Mrs. Thomas herself has been to church, which interesting sort of class divide there, of the different activities of people on a Sunday. I venture a guess at which one we would prefer to do. But anyway, pray. Naturally, of course. So an argument is about to erupt. They're both in the house together. Obviously Kate's been knocking them back in the pub. Mrs. Thomas is feeling particularly pious. They have this argument and at the top of the stairs, Kate attacks Mrs. Thomas and she pushes her down the stairs. So the body is going down. Well, Mrs. Thomas, at this point, she's still alive, is falling downstairs at the bottom of the stairs. She's still alive, but only just.

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[Anthony Delaney]

Right. So you have set this up. We are at a very pivotal point in the story. Now we have Mrs. Thomas has fallen down the stairs. Kate's making her way dastardly towards her, and one might assume she's going to help. But you're. I know, I know. You're about to tell me she's not going to help.

[Maddy Pelling]

She's absolutely not going to help. We actually have Kate's words, her confession of what happens next. I'm going to read that to you in her own words. At first I thought her a nice old lady that I might be comfortable and happy with, but I soon found her very tiring and that she had many things to annoy me during my work. On the evening of the murder we had an argument that ripened into a quarrel, and in the height of my rage and anger, I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor below. She had a heavy fall. I felt that she was seriously injured, and I became excited at what occurred, lost all control over myself, and to prevent her screaming or getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat and in the struggle she was choked and I threw her on the floor. I became entirely lost, and in fear of being discovered, I determined to do away with the body the best I could. I chopped off the head from the body, assisted with the use of a razor. I also used the meat saw and the carving knife to cut up the body. I prepared the copper with water to boil the body to prevent identity, and as soon as I had succeeded in cutting it up, I placed it in the copper, boiled it down. I opened the stomach with a carving knife and burned up as much of the parts as I could. When I used to look upon the scene before me and the blood about my feet, the horror and dread I felt was inconceivable. I was bewildered and acted as if I was mad, and I failed several times in strength and determination, but was helped on by the time Devil in this vile purpose. I remained in the house all night endeavoring to clean up the place and clean away the traces. After the murder, I burned part of the body after chopping it up and boiling the body and I think one of the feet.

[Anthony Delaney]

Okay, that's a lot. I want to preface this by saying that in no way what I'm about to say is this trying to excuse what it seems very likely that Kate Webster did. So let's have that as the baseline of the next part of this conversation. She did not say those words. She just didn't. A working class Irish woman who has come over in the 1870s, maybe she did and they flowered it up a little bit. Maybe there is no sense of her in those actual words.

[Maddy Pelling]

I think we can at the very least say that it's been filtered through at the very least different sources and that the version of her that we get supposedly in her own words is someone who is overtaken by quote, unquote madness. She describes being excited, forgetting herself, kind of becoming almost in a different state.

[Anthony Delaney]

Well, the devil's present. She's saying, yeah, you know, there's a world in which this is some kind of legal defense, but this is not a working class Irish woman's voice. And that's not to underestimate what working class Irish women could do in terms of articulation.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's.

[Anthony Delaney]

That's not authentic. It doesn't ring true at all to.

[Maddy Pelling]

What is ringing true for me is the description of the psychological state. I can imagine there being a world in which she is kind of. She has almost like an out of body experience that she's overtaken by something. But I agree the language being used and this portrayal of her as monstrous.

[Anthony Delaney]

I don't even know about the psychological thing. I get what you're saying. And there may be a world in which again that it's quite useful for defense to have those things, but it almost seems too coherent it of a very grisly action. It tries to join the dots too easily for us, I think. So that's why I'm suspicious about it.

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay. Yeah. And I suppose actually also that she is. It almost not excuses the murder, but it explains it because she's a woman. According to Victorian ideals of femininity, she shouldn't be murdering people, let alone strangling them with her bare hands and chopping them up. It's not very ladylike. And so I think from what you're saying, like maybe, yeah, we can. There's a world in which her being sort of separate from her actions and removed and taken over by the devil. Kind of makes sense of that. It's like a woman couldn't possibly have done this. So here's a narrative of her being taken over and then she regained her senses and was like, what have I done? This is terrible. Oh, no. Because the other option, it was maybe premeditated, or that she simply had no remorse and just got on with it. I think that's an unpalatable.

[Anthony Delaney]

I am remembering an older episode here now, based on what we were just talking about, and it's when Professor David Wilson said to us, the criminologist, that people might be familiar with, if not go back and listen to the episode that he's on, but he's like, stop looking for the answers to why. Because the whole thing in these cases is that we can never understand the why. It's not there for us, whereas the why is very much there.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's given to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that's legit. We do know, though, she did do these things and that this all took place in the kitchen, which, again, kind of feeds into. It's an inversion of this narrative of domesticity, of, you know, the servant's place being maybe in the kitchen, where you should be preparing food and lovingly caring for the family that employ you, not dismembering them. She puts at least part of the body into what is called the copper. This is a big metal pot that's used for laundry, usually sort of bricked in at the corner of a room with a fire lit underneath. The smell of this, as you can imagine, was so offensive. And it went on for all day and all night as she was working on this corpse that the neighbours did notice. They didn't do much about it, but they did. They did notice that something strange was going on. She burned some of the bones, she's taking out the intestines. Some of them she puts into a box. She can't fit one of the feet in. She talks. We heard in her words there, if they are her words, that one of them does go into the copper, but there is a foot that she can't fit in. Or again, I think there is at least a sense of, like, disorderly thinking. She's not. This isn't a very professionally executed dismemberment. You know, this is chaos. She's just. She's boiling stuff, she's setting fire to stuff in the grate. You know, she's chopping it up. She puts some in a wooden box and she takes the head in a black bag to maybe take it out into the world and hide it somewhere else. And we know eventually it does end up in the ground and we'll get to where exactly that is.

[Anthony Delaney]

David Attenborough's house.

[Maddy Pelling]

I mean, you're wrong. But wait and see, wait and see. Be patient, have patience.

[Anthony Delaney]

Whose head is that, then?

[Maddy Pelling]

Oh, my God, it's the same head. Sorry. Go, go, go. Wow. There is a story, a myth, if you like, associated with this moment, this horror. Whether or not it's true, it's hard to tell. The story goes like this. When she was boiling everything in the copper, fat was rising to the top. She skims this off. She then goes to the pub next door, the Hole in the Wall, and she sells it to local children as lard or dripping for them to eat.

[Anthony Delaney]

Children in the pub. I guess they.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's the 19th century, mate.

[Anthony Delaney]

It could have been. Now, come here. Two things. If that drippings thing is true, if that again, is not the person who gave that description of what she did.

[Maddy Pelling]

Because it's not in there. It's not in that description.

[Anthony Delaney]

It's not in there. But also they're just not the same person.

[Maddy Pelling]

So this story, we supposedly now know that the landlady of the pub herself, once the crimes had been outed and reported in the press, that she put this story about. Whether or not she's the original source of it, we don't know. But certainly it would have helped with this. So we have to take it with a pinch of salt, with a spread of fat. Yeah. But horrific to think about. And again, it comes down to, you know, a woman feeding another woman to children. This is. So, as you say, what is dripping? Dripping is the fat from animals and.

[Anthony Delaney]

People eat it just on its own.

[Maddy Pelling]

Sure. I think it's quite an old fashioned thing now.

[Anthony Delaney]

All right.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Anthony Delaney]

That sounds disgusting.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. Not the best. I think it's quite tasty on toast. But you don't want to eat a person.

[Anthony Delaney]

No, no, no, no, I don't.

[Maddy Pelling]

Do not recommend.

[Anthony Delaney]

Put that on the record now.

[Maddy Pelling]

So she's done the killing. She's semi disposed of the body chaotically in different ways. You can imagine the kitchen is in a bit of a state at this point. You wouldn't want to be making your beans on toast in there. But of course, now what? She's killed her mistress. Her mistress has. She's not only dead, she's disappeared. So what's she gonna do? She's gonna impersonate her.

[Anthony Delaney]

Oh, good, that seems like a great plan.

[Maddy Pelling]

It's just gonna go really well for that.

[Anthony Delaney]

And this is why she was in those fancy clothes.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. So she puts on the clothing of Mrs. Thomas. Silk gowns, a gold watch, jewelry.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, she was wearing jewelry in that picture.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. She's dressed in the finery of a lower middle class home. She then goes to a family called the Porter family in Hammersmith. They've not seen her for a few years and she turns up and she says, oh, my name's Mrs. Thomas now. I've got married, I'm a widow, I've inherited a house. Could you possibly help advise me on how to sell all of my furniture and belongings in it? Thank you very much. And they're like, this doesn't seem suspicious.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, sure.

[Maddy Pelling]

Okay. And they introduce her to a pub landlord called Mr. Church. Now pub landlords in the 18th and 19th century were very often auctioneers as well, and auctions would take place in pubs. The Porters take her to meet Mr. Church, the landlord and the auctioneer, and they go to the house where she takes them through. And she's like, these paintings of people on the walls, they're my ancestors, they're my family. She's like, that piano, I can play that. And they're like, cool. This is. It's quite weird, but, you know, they don't take enough notice of the oddity to stop what they're doing. And they start taking the furniture out of the house. And the neighbors come out and are like, what are you doing with Mrs. Thomas things? And they're like, oh, we're selling it. And suspicion is mounting. She's not caught at this point, Kate. The neighbours don't suspect enough. They haven't added up the horrible smells with the furniture going. But they're like, this is definitely weird. She asks Mr. Porter's son Robert, who's about around the age of 20, to help move the box that has part of the body in. She says, can you help me carry this to the River Thames? To a bridge, Richmond Bridge. This is at night, it's dark at this point. And this 20 year old Robert's like, sure, yeah, that's fine. And when they get to the bridge, she's like, you can go now. I'm just gonna wait for my friend who's gonna come meet me. And he's like, okay, yeah. Do you want help with the box? She's like, no, no, leave it there, it's fine. As he's walking off, he hears an almighty splash.

[Anthony Delaney]

Turns around, Kate's gardener.

[Maddy Pelling]

He's like, weird. I don't know what that was, of course. A few days later, news hits London that a box has been found on the shore of the River Thames and inside are body parts. Now, I think this is really interesting. Mr. Church, the auctioneer, does put two and two together and he's like, was that your box? And Kate says, no, no, no, that's just the trash media.

[Anthony Delaney]

She's really bad at it.

[Maddy Pelling]

She's winging it. Like, she's absolutely winging it. But she's like, that's just. That's those trashy penny dreadfuls. That's all it is. They're just making it up. It's fine. What I think is really interesting, because we've seen this before, is that when the box with the body parts is initially discovered, people are like, oh, it's medical students playing a trick. It's a joke. Which we've seen in the Thames Torso Murders, another episode. Go back and listen. And I'm sorry. How badly behaved were medical students in the 19th century that the first thought when you find a dismembered body is you're like, ugh, hilarious.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Maddy Pelling]

And that happens again here. But when they start to at the body parts, they're like, oh, someone has hacked this. This hasn't been done with medical instruments. There's no skill involved here. This is butchering. And so the news does break that there has been a murder. Kate, meanwhile, still hasn't been caught, but she's like, maybe it is time to go back to Ireland. I think it might be time to leave town. So she pops off back to killing Culaine. Killing Killen.

[Anthony Delaney]

She's been doing the killing. God, I'm so sorry.

[Maddy Pelling]

Nominative determinism.

[Anthony Delaney]

Forget about it.

[Maddy Pelling]

She just rocks up her uncle's farm and she's like, I live here with you now. And he' how was your time in London? Was grand. It was fine. I'm home, everything's normal.

[Anthony Delaney]

Definitely didn't kill a woman.

[Maddy Pelling]

Definitely didn't boil her and feed her dripping to children in a pub. Nope.

[Anthony Delaney]

I'll tell you what I didn't do.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah. And the uncle's like, cool. The police now make the connection back in London between the body parts. They go to the house, which of course is empty of its furniture, and inevitably they go into the kitchen. There are blood stains. She has cleaned up a little bit, but there's fat still smeared down the back of the copper where the body's been boiled. There are the remains of Bones in the fireplace. She's not done a great job of covering it. I mean, it's really grim. This is a human being who's been utterly dismantled. It's not great. They are able to tell that this has happened without modern forensics. The evidence is that immediate. They obviously go to Ireland to get Kate. They know where she's gone, they know it was her. She's arrested and she's brought back to England for trial and inevitably the media circus begins.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, this is very. It's got all the ingredients for a 19th century media trial. We have an immigrant, we have an Irish person. We have. And, you know, we're on the cusp now of land wars in Ireland. The Irish question is long raging the famine. I mean, Kate's born just at the end of the famine and the idea.

[Maddy Pelling]

That the Irish can come into your good British homes and threaten you from your domestic safe space, it's so insidious. And the media latch onto that and.

[Anthony Delaney]

She'S a woman, so therefore it's even more so, you know, these female killers, I mean, Victorians had real. Not just the Victorians, we do too have this real fixation on female killers. So it's like.

[Maddy Pelling]

Because it still feels unnatural to us, more so because we're obviously used to numb against male violence. So when a woman does something similar, we find that shocking because it seems unusual to us and, you know, that's a whole other conversation. But the language in the press that's used to describe her is absolutely in line with what you're saying. So she's described as an awful butcher, singularly fiendish and interestingly, she's described as a savage.

[Anthony Delaney]

So there's two things there, right, and we don't need to dwell on it too much, but like savage was used to describe Irish people in the 19th century, so there's something derogatory going on there. But at the same time, her actions were savage. You know, that, that butchering is quite savage.

[Maddy Pelling]

They're brutal. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think as well, that's a word that's being knocked around in the 19th century British Empire as well, and, you know, has colonial overtones, not only in Ireland, but across the British Empire.

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[Maddy Pelling]

I want to talk a little bit about the media then, and also the media in our own moment because of course we have the story of the body being chopped up, what's left of it being discovered. We know, by the way, that the head, let's talk about the head for a second. Is carried around in this black bag for quite a while. She even goes to the, I think it's the porters, and takes tea with them. And the head's just in a bag under the table and nobody knows. She's literally carrying it around with her, which is, again, I think speaks to her mental state as well. She does, of course, have to get rid of it at some point. Presumably it's gonna start to smell and cause problems. So she goes to the Hole in the Wall pub and she buries it in the pub, or at least hides it in the pub because cut to 2010, when the work is going on, the head is discovered next to on top of Victorian tiles in the ground. So that's how it's dated. There is a coroner's report done and they conclude that it is most likely the head of Mrs. Thomas.

[Anthony Delaney]

Okay, so you're talking about how the press covered the murders in the 19th century. It'd be interesting to see how they covered the discovery in the 21st century.

[Maddy Pelling]

Yeah, so what's so interesting is that so much of the myth or the rumor around Kate that was in circulation in the 19th century, so feeding the dripping to the children, that language of her being brutal, of being savage, is absolutely just carried through to the headlines of the 21st century. The Daily Mail headline, when this discovery is made and it is linked to the Kate Webster murder, reads, cut up and boiled to feed street children. Horrific fate of Victorian murder victim whose skull was found in David Attenborough's garden. The Telegraph goes with Callous. Kate Webster and the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph all report the drippings story as fact, which is really interesting. And, you know, it is hard to verify, it's hard to disprove.

[Anthony Delaney]

There's a source, isn't there? Like, you almost don't need to prove it because there's a source from the time that says it happened. So you can just report it in that sense.

[Maddy Pelling]

But it's taken at face value.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Maddy Pelling]

So it is really interesting. The skull itself has fractures on it and so it's understood that they possibly occurred when Mrs. Thomas fell down the stairs. And that's kind of how it's identified as being hers potentially. But yeah, it's not a light story, but I think it does tell us so much about the experience of immigrants, the experience of women, the dangers of the hierarchical structure of the home, the tension between domestic servants and their masters and mistresses and how that could turn sour so easily. Yes, an interesting one.

[Anthony Delaney]

Do you know what I love about these stories? Love is probably a strong word, but do you know what interests me about this? One of the things that fascinates me most about all types of history, big, small, working class, elite, whatever it is, is that I am really interested in what happens when people close the front door, when they go into their own spaces, their privacy, what's happening? And we have this very vivid picture that's being painted because of these crimes. And so often crime is the way to discover these things. Of this house in London, where the door is closed, there's two women living together, not particularly unusual, and the tensions between them, the domestic rivalry between them. It's odd to me that Mrs. Thomas kept Kate around, if she was such a nuisance, like, just get rid of her, you're paying her, like, kick her out.

[Maddy Pelling]

There are plenty of other young Irish women in London who will work, so.

[Anthony Delaney]

It'S interesting to think of those tensions if they were there, as described in the, in the documentation. That house transforms itself from this workaday, lower middle class London house into a gruesome murder scene. It's the same house and it's the. Those things existing side by side for me are the creepiest, creepiest things. You know, when you talk about, like Rillington Place or when you talk about the Crippen murders, it's the house and it's what's. So it's meant to be a place.

[Maddy Pelling]

Of safety and it becomes a house of horror. Yeah. And I think for me it's the, it's the immediacy of this. It's the fact that until this moment with David Attenborough, people didn't know where her head had gone. And it was, you know, a story that was gonna be lost to history and that it was accepted that would never be found and that this murder victim would never be, you know, properly put to rest. And yet here we are. And it's a reminder, especially in a city like London, where there are so many layers of history one on top of the other, how visceral that is beneath our feet and that beneath the ground is evidence of all manner of human life, good and bad, waiting to be discovered.

[Anthony Delaney]

Yeah, no, it's a really, really interesting case. Thank you for sharing it. If you've enjoyed this episode. We have others, of course. We have Amelia Dyer, Maddie Rut. You're gonna have to help me with some of these. We have Jack the Ripper. I'm thinking of other 19th century crimes. What else do we have?

[Maddy Pelling]

The Thames Torso Murder.

[Anthony Delaney]

Ah, that's Good.

[Maddy Pelling]

Is my, I don't wanna say favourite book, but it's a really bleak but important history.

[Anthony Delaney]

And we have Palmer the Poisoner. So we've got other murder Victoriana going on in if that's what is interesting to you. So you can go and check those episodes out. If you have enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts or a thumbs up on this video if you're watching on YouTube. Until next time, happy listening.

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[Maddy Pelling]

I'm gonna make him an offer he.

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[Maddy Pelling]

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[Maddy Pelling]

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[Maddy Pelling]

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